For me, a kid who rooted for the Giants growing up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, Dodger Blue and 42 represented all the bad and evil things in the world, especially 42.

How could I not despise this guy who was such a great baseball player, who could hit, field and run the bases like no one else? How could I remain loyal to my dear Black and Orange if I didn’t hate Jackie Robinson even more than I hated the Dodgers?

And I sometimes even noticed he wasn’t white. It was the uniform and the number 42 on his jersey and how he always seemed to destroy pitcher Sal Maglie and the Giants, not color, that drove my feelings.

It was more than a lifetime ago, but the memories came flooding back when, on a recent rainy Friday morning, I saw there was an 11:30 showing of “42’’at the Neshaminy Mall AMC movie theater. So, always believing in knowing thine enemy, I went.

Man, what an emotional experience. Especially for someone who lived through that magic time when New York City had three baseball teams, a time dubbed the Golden Age of Baseball in New York — 1947 to 1957.

And my neighborhood — a melting pot of first- and second-generation immigrant parents who survived the Depression — was equally divided among families of Jewish, Italian, Irish, Polish, Russian and even Gypsy origins. But what really separated everybody was which of the three teams you rooted for.

In the world when I was a kid, it mattered socially whether you were true-blue Dodger — or not. Us Giants fans had to stick together, because we were considered second-class citizens. Even my own family, all Dodgers fans, didn’t talk to me from mid-April until after the World Series in October, because it was almost a given that two of the three New York teams would be playing in the Fall Classic.

My father, who personally knew some of the old Dodgers, even Charlie Ebbets, the owner for whom Ebbets Field was named, as well as my sister and my brother-in-law spent countless hours trying to convert me by taking me to see Dodgers games at that field in Flatbush, Brooklyn. I think my cousin, Bobby, who lived within walking distance of Ebbets Field, was in on it, too.

But I resisted, even to the point of telling my father I wasn’t going to accept an invitation for a tryout from the Dodgers. Maybe the only advice my pop ever gave me came at that point, when he said, “Go. Make the team. Maybe you’ll be traded.’’

All of that emotion and experience were aroused in me by this latest Jackie Robinson movie. It was especially moving to see the recreation of Ebbets Field and the Giants’ Polo Grounds, sites of both legendary ballparks now home to high-rise apartment buildings. On the way out of the theater, strangers stopped to tell each other what they remembered. One woman said she was in tears all the way through the film because of how much she fell in love with Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s wife. She admired the strength Rachel showed during that first horrible year when Jackie endured brutal racism and bigotry for breaking the color line to become the first Negro, in the vernacular of the time, to play in the major leagues.

For me, whatever I may have felt about Robinson the player, the backdrop to the story was the courage shown by one of my all-time heroes of the game, Leo Durocher, the Dodgers’ manager in 1947 who went on to manage the Giants to their miracle finish in 1951. I never thought Durocher, “Leo the Lip,” got enough credit for his role in forcing his players to either accept and play with Robinson or get traded. In an early-morning diatribe that would have been considered a classic soliloquy in Shakespeare’s time, he delivered his ““I do not care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a zebra” speech to the team that had to train in Cuba because racist Florida laws would not allow teams with black players.

Maybe the critics have had mixed feelings about the movie. OK, so it may not be considered a classic, but emotionally, reliving Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey’s defiance of the “gentlemen’s agreement” that kept Major League Baseball white, while there was such a wealth of great talent in the Negro Leagues, made it more than a movie.

“42” was a trip back in time to an age of innocence, and of racism, bigotry and all the ugliness of a nation still rebounding from the Second World War. For me and the kids I grew up with, our brothers and sisters, our parents, our cousins, though, baseball trumped racism. We loved and hated ball players for their ability.

Even I have to confess that I really admired Robinson for his skill, his class, his ability as a human being.

I even used a Jackie Robinson bat when I played baseball, because the thick handle allowed me to deal better with the inside pitch.

What better lesson in life can there be?

Dan Weissman is a New York Giants fan who grew up in Brooklyn and still went on to cover politics in New Jersey.